ST. LOUIS—The next few weeks could provide a little clarity in the National League Central, which is the only NL race resembling, y’know, an actual race.

The St. Louis Cardinals opened a demanding stretch of 13 consecutive games against either the Cincinnati Reds or the Pittsburgh Pirates on Monday night with an 8-6 comeback win against Cincinnati. That moved them a half-game ahead of the idle Pirates and 3 1/2 ahead of the Reds.

“There’s a decent amount of games left, but in the grand scheme of things, not really,” said Allen Craig, who delivered the crushing blow Monday with a grand slam in the seventh inning. “It’s getting to crunch time. Our schedule has been extremely tough, playing the Braves and now we’ve got the Reds and it doesn’t get any easier. We needed to win this game, the first game of a big series."

During this stretch, the Cardinals host the Reds for three games, then travel to Pittsburgh for three, head to Cincinnati for four and then return to Busch Stadium for three more with the Pirates. And the Cardinals just won two of three from Pittsburgh at home Aug. 13-15. The Reds and Pirates don’t play until the end of September, but they do face each other in six of the final nine games of the regular season.

“The more you play somebody,” Reds manager Dusty Baker said before Monday’s series opener, “the more familiar you are with somebody.”

The will soon be no secrets left. Individually, these wins count just the same as wins against sub-.500 teams, but wins against teams competing for the same playoff spot are worth a full game in the standings, not just a half-game, because it hands the other team a loss, too.

What’s at stake? For the division winner, it’s a few extra days off in October, the opportunity to skip the torturous one-game wild-card round, and possibly a shot at home-field advantage through the NL postseason (if they wind up with the best record in the league, which is a definite possibility). That’s a worthy prize.

Because of the two wild-card setup, all three teams are virtually guaranteed a playoff spot; only the Arizona Diamondbacks and Washington Nationals have even a remote shot at a wild-card berth, and that would take a minor miracle. Arizona is six games out of the second wild-card spot and Washington is eight back.

A few things to keep in mind over the next few weeks:

• The Reds have had offensive consistency issues at times …

… but they have two players at the top of their order who get on base more than anyone in the National League. Joey Votto, the No. 3 hitter, leads the NL with a .432 on-base percentage and leadoff man Shin-Soo Choo is second at .411. That's a good start.

They’ve had problems finding someone other than Brandon Phillips (95 RBIs, .355 average with runners in scoring position) to drive home Choo and Votto, but that’s a better problem to have than the inability to actually get anybody on base. And now that Ryan Ludwick is back from the disabled list—he tore the labrum in his right shoulder on opening day and missed four months—maybe, just maybe, the Reds’ September lineup might look like the one Baker expected this spring.

When Ludwick, the projected No. 4 hitter, went out, Baker immediately moved Phillips to the cleanup spot. That solved one problem, but created another. Eight different players have hit in that No. 2 spot in the lineup, with almost no success—combined, those eight have hit just .226 with a .273 on-base percentage from the two-hole. Those numbers are both 29th of the 30 major league teams.

“My second hitter is batting cleanup,” Baker said.

It’s not a certainty that Ludwick will return to the cleanup spot, though. He’s batting .360 in his past eight games, but Phillips has done so well in his new role that Baker might hesitate to take him out of that spot. Asked about that scenario before Monday’s game, Baker just smiled and said, “I’ll let you know.”

• Third place might not be so bad …

… if the final-week gap is multiple games. There’s a not-so-improbable scenario that could actually give the third-place team an important playoff advantage.

Let’s say two teams are fighting for the division lead (going off today’s standings, the Pirates and Cardinals) with three games left, and the third team (Cincinnati) is four games back. Because the Reds can lose all three games in their season-ending series with the Pirates and still be the second wild card (barring an improbable comeback by the Diamondbacks or Nationals), they can give their regulars a day or two off and make sure Mat Latos or Homer Bailey is ready to start the one-game playoff.

And because the Cardinals and Pirates will go all-out to win the division—getting into a best-of-five series is vastly preferred to the nightmare one-game coin flip—the team that fails to win the division could very well wind up throwing its fourth or fifth starter, or one of the top three guys on short rest, in the wild-card game. Either way, that would be a big edge for the Reds, or at the very least, it would negate any type of home-field advantage.